One of the oldest tropes on the Internet is raving about bacon for clicks. Just to prove this is on the Internet, today we’re going to rave about bacon.
Well, pre-bacon really. The daddy of bacon. Pork belly, the slab of muscle and fat on the belly of the pig. Prepares moar often as bacon because it’s very tasty, and it takes a salt or sugar or smoke cure very well.
Our first experience with Pork Belly proper, not yet converted into bacon, was in Ireland. Killarney, to be specific. The national park there is tremendous. Fully recommended. We hiked around all day there. You wouldn’t believe the size of the stags flitting across the prairies.
Then we dined out to a delicious dinner on a rainy November night. Because it was off season for tourists, all was quiet except for the hen party across the dining room. I had sea bass, Jenny chose a pork belly.
Jenny chose wisely. Imagine a steak sized slab of bacon, tender and salty inside while crisp and savory outside. We walked back to our lodging that night marveling how sad it was Americans turn it into bacon. Not that bacon is poor fare, but that Pork Belly is surpassingly great.
Fast forward a few years. We figured out bacon is best prepared in the oven. Rimmed baking sheet. Parchment paper. Bacon slices laid out. Oven at 400 for 23 minutes. Never again on the skillet, this is too good.
Fast forward beyond that. Friend named Bud says “Robert you need a Traeger” and Robert lol’d. Then Bud slow smokes a pork belly on Sunday and brings it to work on Monday. The doors of the new covenant heaven swung open. It was every bit as incredible as I remembered. By the end of the month I had picked up a Traeger with an end of season clearance deal. I tracked down a source for slabs of pork belly. Turns out they intermittently appear at Costco.
Jenny eats the now freshly prepared pork belly and declares the Traeger was the best kitchen investment we’ve ever made. “It’s meat candy!” she exclaims. I agree, humbly of course, and proceed to find Costco’s with pork belly about once a month. After a few months we begin to ask ourselves: if we’re trying to raise all of our meat from our property, what are we going to do about pork belly?
Well, time for more pigs. The Kune Kune variety turned out to be a lot of time for little meat, just like Salatin warned. So they’re out. Craigslist had a man selling Idaho pasture pigs for a reasonable amount. We’ll take two and raise one for a friend, provided friend helps us appraise and pickup the pigs. He did, we did, bada bing, we have a pair of sows among us.
The plan started great. Feed barrel, water barrel, and shade unit surrounded portable electric fence. Pigs on pasture, feeding on grass and churning up the bramble to eat the roots.
That worked until it didn’t. We got tired of moving the fence. Bandwidth with a baby just looks different. We let them live in the pasture as porcine libertarians. We fed a blend of corn and Kalmbach protein that we blended for them. That saved a few bucks per 50 pound bag of feed. When feeding up to 10lbs a day, that adds up. And man did they tear up some bramble, so long as the bramble was in the shade and we hosed water into them.
By August, it was time to take the girls to the butcher. How do you load pigs into a trailer? Beats me! There’s a dozen different procedures on YouTube. We went with the “feed them in the trailer to get them used to going up a ramp” strategy.
In the process, a helpful friend noticed the axle bolts were sheared off on the back left wheel, so might as well fix that while coaxing the girls up the ramp.
After five days of fiddling and adjusting and optimizing the on-ramp, the girls were finally in the trailer. We closed them up for the night, ready to haul in the morning. What’s that? Did they use the ramp?
No. They certainly did not. One loaded from the side door on the passenger side. It turns out pigs can jump up 24″ into a trailer for corn. The one in the back used the pallet under the ramp to jump in, leaving the ramp squarely attached and firmly unused.
We had the pork processed into ground breakfast sausage, Italian sausage and shoulder roasts. The pork belly was split into half bacon and half pork belly. Mistakes were made and the pork belly was also sliced like bacon, to our mild horror and annoyance.
The annoyance abated as we began to inspect the meat itself. The color of the pork is no longer white and pasty, but deep and succulent. The pasture raising of pork makes a far more flavorful meat through a healthier animal, even with a simple visual comparison.
Nothing to it but to do it. On Sunday I tend to smoke meats. This is entirely from our property. A dozen Scotch eggs, pastured chicken, goat, and a slab of that sliced pork belly.
It was all delicious. The quest for the best pork belly has been mostly satisfied. Who knows, after 10lb of it sliced we may prefer it in this form. We remain Americans, after all.